His Brother's Bride

Scott and Laurel exchanged a glance that warmed Scott in places he’d grown accustomed to being cold. They might have hit on the hiding spot correctly, but there were obviously some other things they’d had grossly wrong.

William was a father. And any fool could see there was no way this man was blackmailing this woman.

“When we got Dennis’s letter with the picture of him and Leslie together, we knew we had to get to her as soon as possible to tell her the truth,” Cecilia said. “She couldn’t date her uncle.”

“But when we got there, Dennis was waiting for us with a gun,” William said. “We didn’t have a chance. He’d already taken Leslie away.”

Scott could feel Laurel’s closeness as he asked, “Where’d he take her?”

“Here,” Cecilia said. “He’d been on his way to New Ashford to find out why, after all the pressure he’d applied, I wasn’t calling him. He was driving through Cooper’s Corner and saw William and me together. He said he couldn’t take a chance on us getting to Leslie, she was his backup ace, so he went to her place and forced her to leave with him. He locked her up and then went back to Leslie’s to wait for us. He knew we’d come.”

The woman seemed to wilt from the effort the long speech cost her.

“Leslie’s locked somewhere close by,” William interjected. “Up until it got dark the last time, we’d been calling out to each other. The first couple of days we talked a lot—she was almost as thrilled to find us as we were to finally find her. She said she’d been looking for us for a couple of years, but kept reaching dead ends. Anyway, as the days wore on and we had less and less to drink, we decided not to talk as much to keep our throats from getting so dry and sore. The last day or so we only talked enough to make sure we were all okay and to promise one another to hang on. The last time we called out to her, there wasn’t an answer.”

“She’s probably asleep,” Cecilia said. “That happened a couple of times before when she didn’t answer.”

“Do you have any idea where she is?” Scott asked. He had to force himself to be patient, to remind himself that Cecilia and William were light-headed, suffering from disorientation, hunger, shock, and probably completely unable to feel any urgency.

“In a room next door,” Cecilia said.

Laurel looked at Scott, brow raised. “I don’t think there is a room next door. This is the basement.”

“It might not be right next door,” Cecilia said, her voice growing stronger. “But she’s close.”

It only took Scott a couple of minutes to locate a small traplike door just outside the boiler room that appeared to be some kind of closet. It took another couple of minutes to get the door open.

The young woman huddled in a ball on the floor woke up instantly when light flooded into her cell. She’d managed to fashion a bowl of sorts out of what looked like some kind of tin, half filled with water. As she stood, she stepped in it, tipping it over.

“Thank God,” she said. “I exercised every day—rationed the food the bastard left me. He said he’d call Murphy to come get us as soon as he got to the airport but I gotta tell ya, I was starting to lose hope....”

At that she burst into tears.

With a strength Scott could only marvel at, Cecilia pushed her way through to Leslie and, for what had to be the first time in her life, held her daughter in her arms. Looking at Cecilia, he could easily believe that she was never going to let go again.

Scott had been fairly stoic up until that point. But when he saw William join his two girls and heard Leslie sobbingly ask if everything they’d told her that past week was true and not just some dream to get her to hold on, and then heard William tearfully tell her yes, even Scott choked up.

Somehow Laurel was there then, sliding her arm through his, pressing against his side as together they watched one family get a happy ending.

* * *

THINGS WERE CHAOTIC after that. The paramedics arrived and Leslie convinced her parents to allow themselves to be strapped to the gurneys just long enough to be carried up the stairs. She won their agreement only when she promised to stay right there with them. And then they were all on their way to the hospital for checkups and probably rehydration IVs.

It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, in a private hospital room that now had two beds, that Scott and Laurel finally heard the whole story. After filling out reports at the police station and checking out of the motel, they stopped by the hospital on their way back to Cooper’s Corner. They stood together, though carefully not touching, at the end of Cecilia’s bed. Once she’d received the older couple’s permission, Laurel switched on her tape recorder.

Just as they’d guessed, Dennis had come to Cecilia for money when he was released from prison. What he hadn’t known was that after years of buying him out of every scrape, William Sr. had made Cecilia promise that she would never give him another dime of their money, even after his death. He did it to protect Cecilia. He knew he wasn’t going to be around f

orever and knew, too, that Dennis would take everything Cecilia had if he could.

“When Dennis seemed to calmly accept my decision, I was overjoyed,” Cecilia said. She was propped up in bed against a pile of pillows. William was sitting on Cecilia’s bed, holding her hand.

Scott envied them that familiarity. Laurel’s fingers were only inches from his—he could practically feel them there—yet she suddenly felt so off-limits they might as well have been on different continents. Was it only hours ago that she’d kissed him?

Kissed him goodbye.

“I thought prison had finally done what my husband and I and all of my love could never seem to do,” Cecilia was saying. “Mature him. It never even occurred to me, when I got a copy of Leslie’s birth certificate with her adoptive parents’ names blocked out that Dennis was behind it.”

Scott could have told her that some men never change. Or mature. After all these years, all the guilt and grief, the confession and rejection, he was still in love with his older brother’s woman.